This may be the first time in modern campaign history when a party’s three leading presidential candidates have each replaced their campaign managers before a single vote is cast.
As all of the papers report today, Kerry has fired Jim Jordan as his campaign manager and replaced Jordan with Mary Beth Cahill, chief of staff to Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.).
Naturally, the media is playing this story as a sign of a campaign in disarray. I don’t really see it that way. Kerry, to be sure, is no longer the frontrunning candidate he was in, say, April. He is, however, in the top-tier of candidates in national polls and nearly all of the state polls, his fundraising is strong, and his debate performances have been excellent. I don’t know much about Cahill, but if she can shake things up and give Kerry a more focused campaign, Kerry’s hopes are far from over.
Changing campaign managers appears to be the cool, new thing that all of the leading candidates are doing. In the spring, Howard Dean’s original campaign manager, Rick Ridder, left the campaign angry and frustrated. About a month ago, Wesley Clark’s campaign manager, Donnie Fowler, announced that he was leaving the campaign, upset about the divisions between DC political professionals and Clark’s grassroots supporters. This week, apparently, is Kerry’s turn.
There’s been a bit of a double standard in the press. Looking at all of the major news outlets, all of them devoted a lot of ink on Fowler leaving Clark and Kerry firing Jordan, but none of them said a word about Ridder quitting the Dean campaign.
Admittedly, Kerry’s story is a little different and I can appreciate why the press is playing up yesterday’s announcement. When Ridder left Dean, reporters were largely ignoring Dean’s campaign. For a struggling, poorly-known candidate to loose his campaign manager was seen as a non-story. Kerry, meanwhile, has been expected to seriously compete for the nomination. He fired Chris Lehane a couple of months ago and now has sacked Jordan. If this had happened in March, when Ridder resigned from the Dean camp, Kerry could probably have avoided all the negative speculation. To change campaign managers two months before the Iowa causes, however, is a tougher spin.
That said, I continue to see Kerry as a major player in the race for the nomination. He’s gaining in Iowa, strong in New Hampshire, and likely to start pumping a lot of his personal wealth into the race now that Dean has withdrawn from the public financing system. We’ll see what happens.